1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method, and, more particularly to a medical image processing apparatus and a medical image processing method that are capable of detecting a tuberal shape in a three-dimensional model of a living tissue in a body cavity.
2. Description of the Related Art
An endoscope system including an endoscope and a medical image processing apparatus is widely used in the medical field and the like. Specifically, the endoscope system includes an endoscope including an insertion section inserted into a body cavity as a living body, an objective optical system arranged at a distal end portion of the insertion section, and an image pickup section that picks up an image in the body cavity focused by the objective optical system and outputs the image as an image pickup signal and a medical image processing apparatus that performs, on the basis of the image pickup signal, processing for causing a monitor or the like as a display section to display the image in the body cavity. A user performs observation of, for example, an organ as a subject in the body cavity on the basis of the image in the body cavity displayed on the monitor or the like as the display section.
The endoscope system including the configuration described above can also pick up an image of a digestive tract mucosa of, for example, a large intestine as a subject in the body cavity. Therefore, the user can comprehensively observe various opinions concerning, for example, a hue of a mucosa, a shape of a lesion, a microstructure of a mucosa surface.
Moreover, in recent years, an endoscope apparatus is proposed, for example, described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 11-337845 that is capable of generating a three-dimensional model of the subject, on the basis of data of three-dimensional images corresponding to image pickup signals of images of a subject picked up by an endoscope.
On the other hand, as a method for detecting a lesion area such as a polyp in a three-dimensional model, a method is proposed described in US Patent Application Publication No. 2003/0223627 that is capable of detecting a lesion area in the three-dimensional model by performing evaluation of a shape of the three-dimensional model while using shape feature values based on a curvature such as Shape Index and Curvedness.